Flights

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “Flights” by Lauren Scherr. Lauren is a Japanese-American writer born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i. She's currently traveling and writing a newsletter about resting, creating, and healing. Follow along at yasumi.substack.com. Lauren’s work has previously appeared in ANMLY and 6x8 Press.

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Babies in my family are born bird-like, with plumes of black hair and curiously strong toes. Place a pointer finger beneath the curve of those toes, and you'll catch the clasp of tiny talons. I still use my feet to pluck fallen pens, napkins, and underwear from the floor. Proof of where I come from, proof of a past life.

•••

I descend from people who migrated across the ocean, who traveled more than 2,000 miles from Japan to Hawai'i. They were farmers who left rice fields for sugar cane plantations. Back then, Hawai'i was still a kingdom—not yet a U.S. territory, let alone a state.

I've seen one photo of my mom's grandparents, snapped on the lanai of their cottage on Oahu. I don’t know what year it is. I can only guess from their lined faces and old-fashioned work clothes, which look like rugged kimono. In the background, stalks of sugarcane push out of the red dirt in rows. The leaves seem to rattle in the breeze.

We are separated by just a few branches on our family tree, branches built from their hopes and risks and heartbreaks. Did they picture Hawai'i as a paradise, I wonder, or just another chain of islands? Could they imagine bearing children who would not share their idea of home?

•••

My mom was the first in her family to marry someone who wasn't Japanese—an act of rebellion, maybe, or an act of escape. She may not see it as either, and I have never pushed her to explain. But intentionally or not, she created a gulf between herself and her parents, herself and her husband, herself and her child.

Her middle name is Yoshie, after her father, Yoshiharu, and his father, Yoshigoro. Yoshi, as in good, virtuous, exceptional, well done. She might be rebellious, but she lives up to her name. (You do not have to be good, Mary Oliver wrote. But Mary Oliver wasn't Japanese.)

I'm eager to prove I'm my mother's daughter; I insist on the traits we share. In old photos—her high school graduation, a driver's license from the '90s—I recognize my smile, eyebrows, cheekbones. People say we look alike, but I don't see it, she tells me. I exist in contrast to her, a version from another world. I wonder how it feels to be the same race as your mother, for her to see her face in yours.

The word for half-Japanese is hafu, but I have never been half, always both—white one day and Asian the next. Asian the day I moved into my freshman dorm, white the day I graduated. Asian in this version of the story, white in the translation.

My childhood heroes were shape-shifters and misfits, like Momotaro, the Peach Boy. Momotaro is a famous Japanese folktale, the bedtime story I most often requested. It is the tale of a baby born from a peach and raised by the old, childless couple who find him. He grows into a freakishly strong young man who accepts his destiny: to save his village from plundering ogres. It is not a story about defeating one's enemies, although Momotaro does. It is a story about being a good son.

•••

I am the fourth generation of my family in Hawai'i –  issei, nisei, sansei, yonsei –       a label and an expectation. To be four generations removed is to inherit a knot. I am trying to untangle the threads between love and duty, love and repayment, love and suffering.

In the Crane Wife, a folktale from ancient Japan, a bird must repay the poor hunter who saved her life. She disguises herself as a woman, marries the hunter, and weaves exquisite cloth for them to sell. Her husband promises never to watch her weave, but he sees her wasting away. One day he peeks into the forbidden room and discovers her as a crane, plucking out her feathers. He begs her to stop, but she refuses. He does not understand that love can’t exist without sacrifice. He does not understand that duty can’t exist without enduring pain. And because he's seen her true form, she must fly away.

In Japanese tradition, the crane is the most symbolic bird. Some people believe cranes live for 1,000 years and carry souls to paradise on their wings.

According to the mythology, you get a single wish if you fold 1,000 paper cranes—senbazuru. My cousin taught me the folds when I was eight or nine years old, and I got to work sharpening the creases, making cranes out of Post-Its, dollar bills, and magazine pages. I knew better than to try to reach 1,000. Even as a child, it felt impossible. So I folded smaller and smaller squares until I made one the size of a fingernail. I gave it to Grandpa, and he tacked it to the wall, a thousandth of a wish.

•••

Mom, like her parents, grew up on Oahu, where she was just one of many local Japanese girls. I can imagine how that felt like invisibility, and she longed to be different, more remarkable, even though she was expected to conform. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Her family moved before high school to a neighborhood with more money and more haole (white) people. And, as she tells it, her haole classmates took their presence for granted, despite being in the minority. It was as though they'd never questioned themselves, never lived with discomfort or doubt.

It took me a long time to realize that white people know nothing about whiteness; I wonder when Mom came to this realization. It may have been after college, when she left Hawai'i for the first time, going as far away as she could. She and a friend moved to Banff, a place they'd only seen in photos and where they were the only Asians for miles. It was the mid-'70s, so I guess they were called Orientals. I can imagine the geisha jokes and the stares, but Mom didn't seem to mind. Maybe it's true that Canadians are exceptionally polite. Or maybe it felt good to be visible.

She only came home because she was broke. She didn't expect to meet a haole guy from New Jersey, get married, and have a kid. Her parents, at first skeptical, came to adore my dad. He loved them in a way that must have felt foreign, almost shocking in its straightforwardness.

In my grandparents’ house, among my mom’s siblings and their families, my dad and I were expected to be strange. I resented my difference, but there was also freedom in it. I know, now, that it was a rare gift to feel alien for my whiteness and not a lack thereof. How easily that could have been a different kind of shame.

Strangers ask how my parents met, as though the answer is a puzzle piece. I only know the story in broad strokes and occasional details. They met on Oahu, through a mutual friend. On their first date my dad picked her up in a Ford Pinto. My mom didn’t want a big wedding, so they were married in someone’s backyard, beside a stream. We were each other’s fantasies, my dad once said. I struggle to think of two more different people. They are divorced now, but for more than thirty years, they navigated that distance. I sat, always, in the middle seat.

•••

My mom’s mother, Helen, was born in 1929, in a plantation town on Oahu’s north shore. She lived with her father–an alcoholic, from what I gather–even though her mother and sister left for another island and another life. Helen had half-sisters, from her father’s second marriage, but they, too, seemed to fade away. Family I never met, stories I never heard, all of it locked in a forbidden room.

My mom’s father was born Yoshiharu Kuriyama: good spring, chestnut mountain—an auspicious name. His teacher wrote American names on the blackboard and asked him to choose. He became Fred. I wonder how long it took for him to answer to a new name. I wonder how he would weave a story of his life, so full of drama and tragedy. His father, a plantation worker for 47 years, died      while digging a ditch under a water tank. His brother, a state senator, was assassinated while at home with his kids.

Their ghosts hovered above us, unacknowledged, as we gathered around my grandparents’ table for Sunday dinners. There were often 12 or 15 of us, but evenings would pass mostly in silence. Words can be untrustworthy. Better not to explain.

According to Mom, her parents never said I love you—not to her, not to her siblings, not to each other. So much of their lives couldn't be explained, even if they wanted to. How do you describe the sound of bombs falling on Pearl Harbor? How do you say to your eldest daughter, I didn't have a mother. Don't you know I'm doing my best?

They relied, instead, on practical things. Grandma made my favorite dishes and saved extra to take home in Ziplocs. Grandpa gave me cash when he had a good weekend in Vegas. A crisp fifty, peeled jabong, Okinawan sweet potato tempura: these are love letters.

•••

I left after high school and stayed away for 16 years—in DC, San Francisco, New York. I never figured out how to dress for the winter or how to make another place my home.

In 2020, I returned to Hawai'i with plans to stay for a while. I was welcomed by the heady smell of mock orange blossoms and the trill of familiar birds, melodies I didn't know I'd missed.

Grandma died two and a half months later. We gathered around her frail body and buried her next to Grandpa under the shadow of Diamond Head. We combed through moth-eaten Banker Boxes of their hoarded histories: sketches for Grandpa’s patent submissions, the birthdays of long-dead relatives, a Buddhist altar with someone’s ashes—no one knew whose. No matter how much I sorted and tossed, there was always more—the promise of understanding in the next box.      

Mom and her siblings seemed less desperate to weave these scraps into stories. They learned, long ago, to leave space for the unspoken. They grew around that silence like a house built around the roots of an ancient tree. Three of them—my mom and her two sisters—sat around a small pile of jade and silver jewelry, saying, Here, mom liked this one. It belongs with you. The youngest, Aunty Lori, gave me Grandma’s watch to wear on my wedding day.  She told me to look for signs. The other day, a feather floated down from the sky and into her outstretched hand.

•••

I walk the trail on top of the mountain where I grew up. A rocky path dips over the ridge and overlooks lush valleys on either side. Everything is different up here—the wind is cooler and the veil is thinner. With the right combination of drizzle and late-afternoon sun, rainbows stretch nearly 360 degrees, a gateway to another world.      

My mom lived on this hill for more than 40 years. Four houses, three with my dad and two with me. She and I never came up to this lookout, so we never shared this view. I am in Hawai'i now, for good, it seems, and she is leaving. A house on the mainland, in a town with only eight Asians, a place I do not know. I weep when she tells me, the gasping kind of tears.

Oh, sweetie, she says. I didn’t know you planned to stay.

I can’t explain my grief, contained for years, overflowing. I can only tell her about my longing, fragile and urgent, for her to meet me halfway.

•••

Someone once told me that birds sound different in their natural habitat. In the city they sing simpler melodies, striving, among the chaos, to be heard. From my spot on the ridge I can hear them. Here they sing quieter, more elaborate songs.

I imagine it's because they know their power: to transcend, to transform, to fly through any portal, to return. To live, for however long they choose, in the space between.